06/06/11 - Monday

We woke up late the next morning at around 10am by a phone call telling us it was check-out time. I woke up with a sore throat that had been building the last couple of days, with the added symptom of being thoroughly exhausted. The room was somehow trashed already and we rushed and packed all our bags, dropped off our keys, and left. As we pulled out into the main street we saw....!

Yes, that would be Mt. Fuji right by our hotel - totally invisible the day before. It was large and in charge but as soon as we left the main road we wouldn't see it again (until days later on a train). We hit the road aiming towards the nearest Shinkansen (bullet train) station, planning to drop off the car for the next 7 days. Here's what the views offered:

After 30 minutes we arrived in Mishima and looked for (cheap) parking. After circling around the small town a bit, we parked at a hotel that had no price signs and went inside to ask how much it cost. We learned that it would cost us about 300 yen an hour. 300 yen = 3.71 over 7 days = nearly $700! So we asked the front lady if they knew of a place nearby that offered cheap parking. In America you might get an answer like, "Sure, if you go out and take a right and a left blah blah blah." In Japan?

At once it was a flurry of activity. I lost count of how many hotel clerks were rushing to find us cheap parking: two were on the phone with someone else, one was searching through thick binders, one was talking to someone else in the next room, and one was going over a map with us. The woman going over the map with us spoke really good English and had a really good American accent. She told us the cheapest area, where it was, and how much it was. There were two lots, one that could cost 10,000 yen for the week, but she called them and would let us use the other lot which was only 7,000 yen for the week...

...I'll give you a minute to pause here to let that really sink in... I mean, it was even obvious we weren't going to stay at that hotel but still... whew. OK let's move on.

So we thanked them and drove to the lot. The 3 guys working there knew very very little English but somehow we communicated about the woman at the hotel who had called them, let them know we were planning to get the car back on the 11th or 12th, and paid the 7,000 yen. We gathered our luggage and a guy drove Mike with the van to a nearby lot, gave Mike the key (we could come pick it up whenever we were ready to leave), and we walked the short distance to Mishima station.

We got 3 tickets for the bullet train to Kyoto and waited for an hour, ate a snack in the little wait room area, and watched the train pull in!

The train ride was about 2 hours and looked like this!

We arrived in famous and beautiful Kyoto Station!

We walked to our new hotel which, whoops. Not a hotel.

Important word: Hostel. So our room looked like this (note identical looks of disbelief):

By the way, yes that is a bunk bed on the right, and that is literally everything in the whole room. There was a communal bathroom, living room, and kitchen elsewhere in the building. In the bathroom, the boys and girls went in the same room but there were stalls... that night and the next morning there was a girl in the common bathroom standing around in her underwear that said hello to me... odd. Even for gai-jin it was odd. We decided to only spend one night there. Good news though - it was super cheap! As a side note, for a hostel, it was very clean, hip, and nice. We were expecting a hotel, though, so oh well.

We left our luggage and walked back to Kyoto Station and walked on the sky-walk. Super amazing architecture.

We started exploring this area, but apparently it was a part of a very fancy hotel. We got approached by a very professional Japanese woman who asked us to leave (yes we have been kicked out/asked to leave out of somewhere in every city we've been to! Gai-Jin styling!) so we went further up the sky-walk.

We ate at a very hip restaurant at the top level which had great views and blueberry whiskey which was extremely delicious (I had a calpis whiskey... calpis is a sweet drink that sort looks like watery milk that I really enjoy, and not just because of the name).

We walked across the street to Kyoto Tower (the white building in the above picture) and checked out the binocular views from the top (it was night time at this point).

We bought some souvenirs and wend to a nearby department store (one of the only buildings that was staying open past 9pm), bought toys (yes, we did this a lot), and explored the mall.

We felt like staying out drinking (mostly to avoid going back to our hostel) so we went to a bar that was attached to the hostel building.

Yes, Mike is drinking a Corona.. but it was still a little different:

The drinks were pretty good, but there were a lot of tourists and English speakers (I know! So lame!) so we left and went to this place:

We opened the door and walked in, there were 4 people nearly packing the place. They were all older (some would say salty) Japanese people, with a tough Japanese lady bartender, a very old man on the right singing slow Japanese songs on a karaoke machine, and to the left was an ancient Japanese woman smoking, and another man (the youngest in his high 40s). They all shifted so we could fit at the bar. The old man singing karaoke bought us all a beer and we sat down. The bartender urged to each sing songs that we could choose from a big book. We sang American songs like Green Day (Michael), Red Hot Chili Peppers (Marika and Billy duet). Then Michael sang, by himself, 'In the Navy' by The Village People and Billy nearly fell off his stool with laughter. No one in the bar spoke any English (well, the bartender spoke a few words), but we tried conversation anyway. After our beer we thanked everyone and left (a note here, the ancient lady and the bartender would re-fill our glasses with our bottles of beer any time we would hesitate). Tipsy, we went back to the hostel, played gin and cars, then slept.

Thus marks my first (and probably last - who could top it??) karaoke experience!